Clive Thompson on Social Networks and the Wrath of Moms

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Clive Thompson on Social Networks and the Wrath of Moms

* Illustration: Topos Graphics * The big draw at UrbanBaby.com used to be the discussion boards. The forums were completely anonymous, without even nicknames or handles to identify the participants. As you can imagine, the anonymity sparked some scandalous, rollicking threads—descriptions of boozed-up parenting, icy marriages, and moms who flatly regretted having procreated.

But the nine-year-old Web site aimed at mothers in big cities like New York and San Francisco wasn't all titillation. The boards were also extremely useful. When my wife asked questions—What do you do for colic?What's the best school in Brooklyn?—she received four or five thoughtful replies in less than a minute. I'd never seen such a dynamic, active online community.

Then in May, UrbanBaby, which was purchased by CNET in 2006, launched a redesign. All hell broke loose.

The changes weren't huge, but each of them subtly altered the flow of conversation. CNET added a wide sidebar on the site to create space for ads. This reduced the reading area, a big problem on a board with hundreds of comments per hour. Discussions had been organized chronologically, but immediately after the relaunch, the default setting had "most popular" threads at the top, even if they had been started days earlier. Worse, you had to refresh your browser to see new posts. UrbanBaby users went nuts, demanding a return to the old design.

They soon got it. But not from UrbanBaby. A week after CNET rolled out the hated redesign, a couple of work-at-home computer programmers—longtime UrbanBaby users themselves—launched a rival site called YouBeMom.

They perfectly re-created the look and feel of the old boards. Better yet, they made improvements, including a souped-up search engine and privacy controls that make sure your spouse can't use your computer to find out what you've been posting. They also set up a blog to capture users' requests for site improvements and to outline what YouBeMom plans to do about them.

Within days, there was a mass exodus of users from UrbanBaby to the new site. CNET won't give out traffic figures, and neither will the owners of YouBeMom. But I logged on to both sites recently and compared how often people posted. I'd estimate that YouBeMom has three times the traffic of UrbanBaby. That's just how fragile a social application can be. People have a very sophisticated sense for their online hangout—if you mess up the feel of it, or impede the ways they want to schmooze online, they're gone.

What's more, the speed at which a rival can come online is simply mind-boggling. Given the dirt-cheap prices of bandwidth and server space, you don't even need capital. The YouBeMom folks created their site in their spare time, working around their day jobs, and have spent (they say) almost no money. Unlike YouBeMom, CNET has a staff to pay, so it needs to run ads. You can't compete with free, which is, increasingly, the cost of creating online community.

Other Web sites could run into the same forces that blindsided UrbanBaby. They all face a paradox: It's very hard to make money off a social-network site, but it's incredibly easy for a competitor to emerge. All that a company like Twitter, Dopplr, or Pownce has to do is greatly annoy its audience—usually by trying to squeeze revenue out of them—to be at risk. Some smart coder or two will launch a rival service from their basement, with no financing at all. Hell, they'll launch it without even quitting their day job.

Maybe that's the future of most social apps: They won't be businesses, they'll be hobbies, run as little side projects, like blogs. You'll be having drinks at a bar, and the tech- support dude next to you will casually mention that his online guitar- player network has 3 million Strat- wielding members. And that guy who works in check processing at your company, what's his name? Zuckerberg? Apparently his Facebook thing is making a comeback.